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How to Survive Tax Season Without Burning Out Your Teams | It’s Not Just the Numbers
The expectation that tax preparation can happen instantly is creating real pressure.
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It’s Not Just the Numbers
With Penny Breslin and Damien Greathead
For CPA Trendlines
Tax season is supposed to be predictable. The work comes in, the work goes out, the deadlines hold. But this year, something broke for accounting firms across the board — and it wasn’t the tax code.
The culprit wasn’t client volume or staffing shortages. It was prioritization and communication, specifically, the gap between where priorities were being set and where the people doing the work were actually looking.
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If your firm made it through but felt like you were always reacting, always chasing, always a step behind — this breakdown is for you.
Why Audit Walkthroughs Break Down (and What It’s Really Costing You)
Why one of the most critical audit procedures quietly becomes one of the least effective
By William Englehaupt
Walkthroughs sit at the center of audit quality. They are the mechanism through which auditors develop an understanding of processes, identify control points, and assess risk in context. Yet in practice, they are frequently one of the least controlled and most inefficient parts of the engagement.
They tend to run late, produce incomplete evidence, and generate follow-up cycles that extend months beyond the initial meeting. By the time year-end arrives, teams are often still resolving questions that should have been addressed months earlier. This is not a failure of technical capability; it is a failure of process design.
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Most audit teams do not manage walkthroughs as a defined system of work. Instead, they are treated as a sequence of meetings—scheduled, conducted, and documented with varying degrees of rigor. That approach creates the appearance of progress without delivering the underlying objective: a complete, evidence-based understanding of the transaction flow from initiation through financial statement impact.
Your Website Makes Promises. Do You Deliver?
You only get one chance at that first impression.
By Martin Bissett
Business Development on a Budget
There’s an overall sameness to the majority of accounting firm websites, and typically they make a lot of promises – promises like
- we’re big enough to cope and small enough to care, or
- we are proactive, or
- we’re not just bean counters, or
- we have your best interests at heart, or
- your business is our business.
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You’ve seen all those, haven’t you? Are these or similar promises on your website?
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Randy Crabtree: What if Vulnerability’s What Leaders Need Most? | MOVE Like This
When leaders admit they don’t have all the answers, they create room for others to contribute.
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MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research
Randy Crabtree founded an accounting firm, then came to a difficult realization: Being its founder didn’t make him the right person to lead it. His decision to step aside as managing partner of Tri-Merit opens a bigger conversation about what happens when leaders admit they don’t have all the answers.
On MOVE Like This, Crabtree joins host Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to explore how vulnerability can build trust, help people find roles that fit their strengths, and give teams the confidence to try something new. Now retired from Tri-Merit and focused on speaking, advising, and The Unique CPA podcast, he challenges a leadership model that asks people to appear invulnerable while carrying more than they can sustain.
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Crabtree’s perspective on vulnerability is deeply personal. Twelve years ago, he suffered a stroke. While his physical recovery was relatively quick, the mental recovery took years as he dealt with panic attacks, PTSD, and depression. That experience forced him to acknowledge something leaders are often conditioned to resist: he couldn’t do everything himself. It also prompted him to question other things he had long accepted as true about work and leadership, including the idea that leaders always need to have the answers, hide weakness, and prove their value by how much they can carry.
That questioning eventually led Crabtree to one of the most difficult decisions of his career.
How to Develop the Partners You Already Have
Six areas for evaluation.
By Domenick J. Esposito
8 Steps to Great
Once you have attracted a new partner or a lateral, the next question is: “What do I need to do to develop my existing partners?”
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Here is where I find so many CEOs, managing partners and other senior partners falling short.
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